


Premiere

by mortalitasi



Series: analogeies [2]
Category: Tokyo Ghoul
Genre: Action, Explicit Language, F/M, Gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-12
Updated: 2014-10-12
Packaged: 2018-02-20 20:02:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2441225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mortalitasi/pseuds/mortalitasi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Tsukiyama Shuu finally meets his match - in more ways than one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Premiere

**Author's Note:**

> Nori Kimura is my best friend's character. I only borrow her to write about her awesomeness~*

 

SHIP'S GOING DOWN, CAPTAIN. FUCK THE LIFEBOATS.  
WE'LL SWIM.

…

She’s been trailing Shin Kazuya for little over half an hour when she realizes she’s not the only interested party.

The first thing she notices is the hideous argyle—patterned in _checkers_. So not only is this guy a creep without boundaries, he’s also probably a freaky metrosexual with no concept for modern fashion. She’s actually more preoccupied for the next five minutes with picking out every inconsistency in the offending ghoul’s glaring outfit than keeping an eye on her own target, but when the human moves into a small back-alley and the thief follows, she drops down to the ground by swinging from a drainage pipe and letting go.

Her boots crunch an abandoned soda can as she walks forward. Kazuya just barely has enough time to gasp, alarmed, before she bats him aside like a cat batting away an annoying pest. He careens to the side and smashes against the brick wall to the left, crumpling in a sad heap of tangled limbs and groaning in pain. He’s not dead. Yet.

Nori lifts her head and looks at the trespasser under the shine of the back-alley’s neon lights. It’s late, past midnight, and no one should be here except her. No one in this ward is brain-dead to the point of attempting to hunt on _her grounds_ , so this guy’s gotta be new around here. New and dumb. She’s pretty sure she’d have picked him out long ago if he were a permanent resident—she wouldn’t forget anyone who’d make a habit of wearing blue suede shoes. Or corduroy pants. Eugh.

The idiot’s tall, much taller than her, but almost everyone is. She tries not to think about that. Pisses her off. She crosses her arms across her chest and spreads her legs threateningly, stance widening. _Mine._ She can’t make out most of the ghoul’s features, since his half-moon mask conceals a good part of them, but there’s enough there for her to know he’s smirking. Motherfucker has no idea what he’s gotten himself into. He stretches his hands out entreatingly, as though that’s going to change the fact that he’s committing a crime.

“It seems I’ve been discovered,” he says. His voice is calm, slightly mocking, and the tone of speech is exceedingly formal. It gets on her nerves. “Let me go my way, little lady, and you won’t have any trouble.”

“You’re trespassing, _trespasser,_ ” she snaps, and feels the familiar heat of her kakugan coming to life in her eyes. “I suggest you back the fuck off.”

The stranger laughs. More mockery. “Let’s not make a fuss. I’d rather not have to deal with anyone like the Bear tonight. And I’m sure you wouldn’t, either.”

She doesn’t say anything to that, just waits, to see if he’s going to get it. A few moments pass, Kazuya struggles to get up, she kicks him, and he falls face-down again, moaning something about not understanding and _why me_. Still no reaction from the argyle freak. Colorblind _and_ stupid, then. She lifts one hand at the ghoul, the back facing toward him, and wiggles her fingers at him. His one visible eye squints at her, focusing on the tattoo there—when understanding floods his face, she wishes she had a camera. There’s shock, affront, and then finally disbelief.

“It’s a paw,” he remarks flippantly in a way that makes her teeth grit together.

“A _bear_ paw, you fucking cretin,” she clarifies. Now it’s his turn to cross his arms.

“You can’t expect me to believe a tiny thing like you is _The Bear._ Do I look like a fool to you?”

She looks him up and down, hoping her face is the very picture of criticality. “That’s way too lenient a word for someone in _your_ getup.”

He gasps. “This is Dolce & Gabbana! You have no eye for taste.”

“We’re getting off track,” she snarls, lip curling. Kazuya is trying to creep away behind her. She grabs him by the collar of his starch-white button-down shirt and hauls him in front of her. Her height means he has to kneel to compensate, but she doesn’t mind. It’s more convenient this way. “This is my target. This place is my turf. You don’t belong here.”

“We must sacrifice certain things for dining of good quality,” the other ghoul says. He must really like the sound of his own voice.

“What are you people talking about?!” Kazuya shrieks, eyes wild with fear.

He struggles, but all it gets him is a boot to the back. It rained earlier, so the entire ground is covered in puddles, dirty water that’s come down from the pipes. Kazuya’s hands splash in one as he stumbles. She doesn’t feel particularly sorry for him. He’s a serial womanizer who likes his partners black and blue and sometimes not conscious. He’s escaped conviction by the skin of his teeth not once, but a grand total of ten times, and mostly by favor of his father having important friends in high places—he’s a typical, over-privileged, snotty, unforgiving, piece of upright shit with a moral compass that spins so fast it could be mistaken for a blender. He’s not even extremely attractive, though he smells good enough.

“You need to shut up,” she says, shaking him. His head bobs, he gurgles, and falls silent.

“I’ve come all this way to sample a part of a delectable treat,” the ghoul standing opposite her reminds her. “I painstakingly narrowed my options down until I reached my conclusion—as any true gourmand would. I cannot let you stand in my way.”

“What part of ‘this is my turf’ do you not understand?” Nori repeats. “Do you have a learning impediment, or what?”

“How crass,” he says, sniffing.

“You know what’s _crass_?” she asks, hefting Kazuya up with one hand. He stirs and screams. “This is.”

“No! No! _Please_ , don—”

The human’s neck breaks like a branch and he goes limp in her grip, a puppet cut of its every supporting string. She tosses the corpse aside unceremoniously, listening to the thud it makes when it hits the earth. The ghoul in the half-moon mask has gone suspiciously rigid, his hands curling into fists at his side.

“You… ruined the meal.”

Nori grins at him, bright and cloying. “Oops.”

She learns just five seconds later that her trespasser is a koukaku user, and that the tip of the lance his RC cells form can bore through brick, cement, steel, wood, and every building material known to man.

The kagune bursts from his back, so very _purple_ that she has to narrow her eyes at it just a little before neatly sidestepping it and slamming a fist into his gut. The air whooshes out of him in a surprised gust and he’s blown backward clean off his feet till he crashes into a wall, leaving a gaping hole in his wake. He’s a defense-type, though, so she expects it when he coughs, gets to his feet, and wipes the blood from his split lip with the back of a hand.

“You hit hard, little lady.”

“I know.”

The RC cells flaring into existence behind her sound like fire, and she knows from experience that her release is quite the display. She’s always loved the degree of bioluminescence that comes with owning an ukaku—maybe it’s why she has a soft spot for neon. Her kagune rears above her, flickering, its veins of red pulsing. She’s going to have to end this quickly. She’s no stranger to fighting koukaku types, and this should be no different. Her adversary is now standing straight and smiling despite the tears in his expensive suit.

“What beautiful wings,” he says as he lifts his lance once more. “But they won’t save you.”

“Tall talk,” is all she tells him before she races at him, boots skidding across the ground, powered by the force of her kagune.

She loses her sense of time after that, as she often does while she’s fighting. The trespasser is eerily fast for a defense-type, so she has to compromise, which means striking rapidly, striking deep, and _never missing_. He’s good at keeping his kagune up, and more than once she gets frustrated with how fucking difficult it is to get something through his cover. The alleyway suffers—she glances a corner off a wall completely in an attempt to blast past the infuriatingly dense plank of his kagune that now looks more like a shield than a lance. He startles her once by foregoing his cover in favor of leaning in to make a hit connect, and she curses herself for falling for such a predictable feint. It slashes into her ukaku with bite enough to make her frown and nothing more. If he’s taken aback by her nonexistent aversion to pain, he doesn’t show it.

He’s skilled with his hands, and it shows when they’re in close proximity to each other. He deflects more than half of her attacks, all the while yammering on and on and _on_ in the _name of style!_ Or refined dining! Or in _French_. God, she hates the sound of French. She sends him flying over a pile of rubble for it. Please, she thinks, just goddamn stuff it. Well into their third minute of fighting, she’s sporting plenty of cuts, and the healing factor has started slowing down in direct reaction to the kagune’s drain on her stamina. He’s no better. This is the final run.

He leaves a gash in one of her favorite shirts, and she exacts payment for it. No one’s allowed to rip her clothes, except, well, _her_. She gets in his space and slaps the mask from his face—his kind of pretty face, she admits to herself. He has nice eyebrows, she supposes, and a schoolboy-style haircut. Yuck to that last thing. The few seconds of somewhat-admirations are over, and so is her patience. She punches him, again, and this time, she does not hold back—and this time, this time… he doesn’t get up. His kagune dissolves, floating away in a haze of violet ash.

She stands over him, panting, feeling blood creep down the side of her face, trying to keep a handle on steadily-dying anger inside her. He makes an unintelligible sound that may have been a sentence in another life, fingers twitching. He gurbles and the puddle his face is currently buried in bubbles comically, but she’s so tired she can’t even laugh at it.

“I _am_ the Bear,” she says. Her chest is heaving with exertion. She rolls him over with the harsh nudge of a toe, and brownish water spurts from his mouth. He gasps through the blood and spits out a dark gob of scarlet goop as the blaze of her ukaku fades away. Her arms hurt. Her chest hurts. _Everything_ hurts. She nudges him again. “You ever pull something like this again, and I _will_ finish the job.”

Nori considers him for one moment longer, and then hauls the pulpy mass that used to be Kazuya next to the trespasser. He cracks open an eye to look at it. Confusion conquers his expression.

“I wasn’t that hungry anyway,” she explains, raking her now-straggled hair out of her face. “And you’re gonna need it more than me if you ever want to walk again.”

She swivels on her heel, fully prepared to stride out of the alleyway until she hears him try to move.

“Tsukiyama,” he rasps.

She doesn’t turn to look at him.

“My name… Tsukiyama.”

Nori shrugs and starts on her way.

“Whatever.”

 

 

…

 

 

Emiko very nearly loses her grip on the yen bills she just finished counting when Nori makes a very _loud_ entrance. She’s about to ask what happened—and then she actually notices what Nori looks like. Her long, bleached hair is spattered with blood, and so is her leather halter-top. Her jacket is ripped, her lime-colored leggings have several holes in them, and everything on and around her is somehow coated in a thin layer of brown grime that looks like... dirt?

“Nori!” Emiko says, suddenly coming to her feet. The receipts of the day fall from her lap and scatter everywhere, but she doesn’t care. “What happened?”

“All fuck shit happened,” Nori murmurs helpfully, letting the door swing shut after her. “Some fucking… weirdo. Checkered suit. So goddamn _weird_.”

“Let me get the first aid kit!” the receptionist exclaims.

She all but leaps over the counter to jog into the back-area of the tattoo parlor, and Nori can hear her rifling around in the cabinets before she emerges with a white plastic box clutched between her exceedingly clean hands. Emiko doesn’t look like she belongs in a tattoo parlor—or anywhere near it, actually. She’s a small girl with a kind face, diminutive, and so painfully ordinary sometimes it makes Nori’s heart hurt. She ushers Nori over to one of the sofas in the waiting area of the parlor and opens the first aid kit with nimble fingers.

“You look like you’ve been put through a grinder,” she says quietly, dumping iodine liberally on a cotton ball. She swabs it over Nori’s forehead and the cuts on her chin. “Was he—?”

“Yeah,” Nori replies as Emiko reaches for another wad of cotton. “Ghoul. Really showy. He was being a turd. I showed him.”

Emiko sighs. “I’m just glad you’re alright. You _are_ alright, aren’t you?”

“It’s going to take more than a yobbo in a kitschy outfit to put me out of commission.”

“That’s relieving to hear,” the human says, carefully wiping the dust from her employer’s brow. “Did you, ah…?”

“Kill him? No. Dunno why. Should’ve.”

“That’s good. It is, right?”

“I don’t know yet,” Nori confesses. “Probably a lapse of judgment. He was loud. I have a horrible headache.”

Emiko smiles at her, dimples included. “I’m sure you won’t regret it!”

 

 

…

 

 

She regrets it.

She doesn’t even _like_ flowers.

Nori bends to scoop the gigantic, smelly bouquet from her doorstep that magically appeared just fifteen minutes ago, half past nine AM, and all the blood rushes to her head because of the combined scent of camellias and honeysuckle. And here she’d thought last night was all just a really funny dream.

There are roses in the bouquet, too. Good Lord. Emiko’s face when she kicks the door closed is something between pained hopefulness and embarrassment. She fishes the card out from between the flower stems, and shakes her hand vengefully to get rid of the petals clinging to her sleeves. They spiral down to land around her platform heels. Some of them catch in the laces of her shirt. How troublesome.

“’ _Enchantée, mademoiselle. Are you free for dinner? Signed, T._ ’”

She gags, exaggeratedly, rips the lid off the garbage bin, drops the bouquet squarely inside, and shoves the card in shortly afterward.

“I _knew_ he was bad news.”

Emiko laughs nervously. “At least he’s polite?”

“He’s _French_. Or he wants to be. I don’t know which one is worse.”

She eyes the trashcan. “Are we sure this is the same man?”

Nori grimaces. “There was a Gucci gift card in there. It’s him.”

“Well… maybe you just have to ignore him?”

“You, my friend, are an optimist,” Nori says, jamming the lid of the bin back on. “I have a feeling he doesn’t know when to give up.”

“It’s an admirable quality, at least,” Emiko answers.

Nori just ruffles her own hair, looking every part frustrated, and stares at the trashcan like it’s going to come to life and eat her. “I really should have killed him.”


End file.
